Christmas at the Women's Hotel

Crossposted from Mainlining Christmas

Christmas at the Women's Hotel
Daniel M. Lavery, 2025

New Release! I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review. 

This is a holiday-themed spin-off from a longer novel (titled simply Women's Hotel) imagining the lives, loves, tragedies, and triumphs of a group of women living in a fictional women's hotel. 

The real-life women-only residential hotels were a phenomenon created by a specific time in history, from about the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Young, single women wanted to move to a city to get work, but they didn't have family to stay with. Enter the women's hotel, seen as a safe, respectable place for unchaperoned middle-class secretaries and assistants to live (until they marry and move to the suburbs).

I read half of a nonfiction book about one of the most famous women's hotels years ago and found the concept fascinating. I hadn't heard of the original Women's Hotel novel, but I am a fan of Daniel Lavery from back in the Toast days, so I immediately requested this book. 

I read about a third before deciding to go back and read the original novel, not because I couldn't follow what was happening, but because I really enjoyed living in that world with these characters.

Both books are only loosely plotted, with many intertwining stories, and you learn more about specific women than others. However, each sub-story includes frequent asides about the other women's lives as well. 

The holiday volume largely focuses on ways the women of the Biedermeier pick up extra holiday jobs and feelings about being apart from (or cast out from) one's family at the holidays. The two main women who are focused on are Lucianne and Katherine. Lucianne is fired from her part-time newspaper job and comes up with a scheme to make money arranging for high-class young men to attend fancy parties and be decorative there. Katherine is a recovered alcoholic (there's much more back story for her in the first book) trying to reconnect with her estranged sister. 

I found the stories to be suffused with a certain kind of pleasant melancholy that suited the holiday setting well. It isn't that the women were unhappy (at least not all the time). It's more a sense that no one lives in a residential hotel if they have a happy family life and stable employment. Add on top of that a feeling that the hotel, and those like it, were reaching the end of their ability to function. 

Soon, it would be permitted (financially and socially) for women to rent apartments, have roommates, etc. And while that's a good thing, it means these peculiar little grown-up sororities that sometimes served meals and didn't let men past the front parlor would close down.

So there's a bit of nostalgia in the writing for a place with a plausible built-in sisterhood, a place just for women who didn't really fit society's picture of what young women could be and do. (Several minor characters are LGBT, naturally.) 

I recommend both volumes for anyone who likes historical fiction and reads that last paragraph a little wistfully.